LA DELEUZIANA – ONLINE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY – ISSN 2421-3098 N. 12 / 2020 – OF EXCESS: OUTLINE OF A PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY The Virtual and the Viral: Deleuze, Dark Philosophies, and Global Pandemics by CHRISTIAN FRIGERIO Abstract At the point of convergence Between speculative realism, nihilism, and a certain taste for hor- ror culture, “dark philosophies” have emerged as some of the most original theoretical proposals of our times. All these philosophies see virality as the paradigmatic event that disturBs the gloBal axiomatics of capitalism. Today, this gloBality is precisely what gives virality its enormous strength. What dark philosophies can teach us, through a crossed reflection on current social- political conditions and on the concept of life, is how to draw from virality a possiBility for thought: virality is a pharmacological concept, and its meaning will Be in a great part dependent on what we will Be aBle to make of it. A thorough reflection on virality could Bring us to see in the present situation not only a possiBility for new kinds of individuation, But also a catalyst for a type of politics that is perhaps the only possiBility to cope with imperial axiomatics. Introduction: lessons of darkness Darkness is not the aBsence of light…But aB- sorption into the outside. Georges Bataille (1988: 17) The distinction between axiomatics (or theorematics) and proBlematics is among the guiding dichotomies of Deleuze’s philosophy. This opposition has its source in mathe- matics, where it indicates two different modes of formalization and deduction: “in axio- matics, a deduction moves from axioms to the theorems that are derived from it, where- as in proBlematics a deduction moves from the proBlem to the ideal accidents and events that condition the proBlem and form the cases that resolve it” (Smith 2006: 145). But Deleuze extends these concepts outside of their original field, giving them an onto- logical and a practical significance, that can Be framed through their attitude towards what they identify as an outside. Axiomatics, on the one hand, “develops internal rela- tionships from principle to consequences” (Deleuze 1989: 174) and identifies the suc- cess of a system with its capacity to exclude any ingression from an outside: for instance Hegel’s self-enclosed spirit, or Derrida’s famous claim that “There is nothing outside of 25 LA DELEUZIANA – ONLINE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY – ISSN 2421-3098 N. 12 / 2020 – OF EXCESS: OUTLINE OF A PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY the text” (Derrida 1997: 158; italics removed), or Kafka’s Bureaucracy, endlessly extend- ing the process without ever coming to a resolution. On the contrary, “the proBlem in- troduces an event from the outside…which constitutes its own conditions and deter- mines the ‘case’ or cases” (Deleuze 1989: 174). We have a proBlem once a fissure is opened in the system. A problem is the ingression of an Outside – in the pregnant sense that Blanchot and Foucault have given to this term – that oBliges us to think: “the proB- lematic deduction puts the unthought into thought, Because it takes away all its interior- ity to excavate an outside in it, an irreducible reverse-side, which consumes its suB- stance” (Deleuze 1989: 175). Deleuze’s definition of thought is identical with this pro- cess of proBlematization, with the unhinging of our accomplished systems of thought: “To think is to fold, to douBle the outside with a coextensive inside” (Deleuze 1986: 118); “Thinking doesn't come from within…It comes from this Outside, and returns to it, it amounts to confronting it” (Deleuze 1995B: 110). As long as we remain within an axi- omatic space, we can only hear Heidegger’s appeal that we are still not thinking. For Deleuze, thought is the life and movement of the concept, But a movement that is attain- able only through the impact with the Outside. However, axiomatic systems do not merely exclude the outside. As Deleuze and Guat- tari made clear in Anti-Oedipus, capitalism is axiomatic not only because it has no laws of development apart from immanent ones, But Because of a dynamicity that tends to englobe what it encounters on the outside: “capitalism…is continually drawing near the wall, while at the same time pushing the wall further away” (Deleuze & Guattari 2000: 170). While in 1972 they recognized schizophrenia as the absolute limit capaBle of un- hinging the relative limit constitutive of capitalism, neo-capitalism is marked By an even more voracious and gloBal quality that seems to inhiBit the schizophrenic option: not only does the postmodern insistence on openness play the game of what Hardt and Negri (2000) called the empire – and “Postmodernism is indeed the logic by which gloBal capital operates” (Hardt & Negri 2000: 151) – But imperial voracity has developed to the point that “there is no longer an outside” (Hardt & Negri 2000: 189). The opposition Be- tween openness and closure is thus no longer a useful critical weapon, and the possibil- ity of distinguishing Between axiomatics and proBlematics must be itself proBlematized. But this is not the end of the story. According to Reza Negarestani (2008), capitalism is grounded in a kind of “economic openness” Based on a relation of affordability, for which ‘I am open to you’ means ‘I can afford you.’ But this shall not stop the development of “schizotrategies” and the search for a “radical openness,” that is opposed to economic openness as much as to closure. Negarestani’s “dark materialism” is only one of the dark philosophical tendencies Born in the womB of speculative realism from this alarm towards the deceptive uses of openness: Ben Woodard’s “dark vitalism,” Eugene Thacker’s “horror of philosophy,” Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” – not to mention Andrew Culp’s (2016) dark reading of Deleuze himself – are other attempts to 26 LA DELEUZIANA – ONLINE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY – ISSN 2421-3098 N. 12 / 2020 – OF EXCESS: OUTLINE OF A PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY theorize a kind of radical openness which is alternative to the affordable openness of gloBal market. Steven Shaviro (2014: 83) has descriBed these philosophies as a paradoxical synthe- sis of eliminativism and panpsychism: on the one hand, they deprive men of the secure ground of the world-for-us showing the horrific face of the world-without-us (Thacker 2011); on the other, they attriBute to what is radically alien to the human world (anon- ymous materials, oozes, hyperoBjects, and Lovecraftian creatures) an uncanny agency, a capacity to assault what remains of man in such a world. It goes for them what Thacker says of the medieval philosopher John Scotus Eriugena: “The language of dark- ness…allows him to think the limit of thought itself” (Thacker 2010: 75). Darkness ven- triloquizes the Outside, and a post-postmodern, renewed thought of the outside is what dark philosophies can offer us. If the insights of these philosophers are more compelling today than ever, it is Be- cause they all use virality and epidemics as the paradigmatic events that unhinge axio- matics. They are thus the great heirs not only to Deleuze’s enquiry into the availaBle lines of flight of a given system, But also to Bataille’s “virulent nihilism” (Land 1992). A virus is something that oBliges to an openness irreduciBle to affordaBility, and “Epidem- ic Openness” is indeed directly opposed to economic openness (Negarestani 2003). This is why it is important that we do not reduce virality to a social construction1 or to a mere pretext used By governments to bring bodies to a status of “bare life.”2 Only when it is considered as a problem, as an event that acts as the presentation of the Real (in a Lacanian sense), can virality be turned into a powerful weapon against what the axiomatic system sells us as a ‘reality’: according to Mark Fisher, “one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capital- ism presents to us” (Fisher 2009: 18). Still, Naomi Klein (2007) famously noted how governments in the latest decades regularly used disastrous events to introduce im- portant measures without the consent of the population: isn’t there the risk for virality to be absorBed and turned into one more expedient for a Biopolitical shock-strategy, a renewed enforcement of imperial power? Using insights from the dark philosophies mentioned aBove, as well as Deleuze’s indi- cations for a proBlematic art of life, this paper aims to outline some ways of resistance to this aBsorption – resistance that, it will Be argued, can only Be attained By making of the virus a catalyst for thought, By overcoming the contemplation of its disastrous (humani- tarian, social, and economic) effects, By “making kin” with viruses (Haraway 2016), By turning this shock into the proBlem that announces the advent of the Outside and en- genders the practice of thought. And if the unpleasant neighBorhood that virality has 1 As noted By Žižek, “Both Alt-Right and fake Left refuse to accept the full reality of the epidemic, each watering it down in an exercise of social-constructivist reduction, i.e., denouncing it on Behalf of its so- cial meaning” (Žižek 2020: 76). 2 See for instance AgamBen (2020). 27 LA DELEUZIANA – ONLINE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY – ISSN 2421-3098 N. 12 / 2020 – OF EXCESS: OUTLINE OF A PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY imposed upon us is hopefully destined to end soon, the operation of drawing from it an act of thought is all the more urgent. Miasmatic insurgence As written By the dark philosopher Ben Woodard, “Viruses serve as an uncomfortaBle reminder of how tenuous our so-called dominion over nature turns out to Be” (Woodard 2012: 19). If virality can be considered a revolt of darkness against the Brightness of gloBal capitalism, it is also Because it is the structure of the empire itself that endows virality with its destructive power.